Wedding season is just around the corner, so there’s no time like now to learn some new tricks and brush up on your existing skills. In this series produced by Profoto, wedding photographer veterans, Justin and Mary Marantz, take you on a walk through of 20 different weddings, explaining lighting setups, must-have shots, and walk through of showing you exactly how they photograph in different settings and locations. The videos were made over the course of year, so you get a wide range of scenarios to learn from.

Here’s a sampling of the videos from the collection along with a playlist at the bottom so you can watch all the episodes. [Read more…]

Cosmetic products are some of the hardest things to photograph. The combination of reflective, translucent, opaque and shiny surfaces makes it an absolute nightmare. Below you will find my quick and dirty method for dealing with those hard to shoot subjects.

Defining the problem: While shooting a portrait outdoors, I usually add a fill flash to eliminate any “racoon eyes” and dark shadows on the face. The fill flash is set set at 1.7 stops under exposed for a light touch. My setup is a Nikon D600 with Nikon SB700 flash (mounted on the camera’s hotshoe) using TTL metering at -1.7 EV. In the example the lighting on the face is good (soft & directional) but you can see a hard shadow on the right side of the subject.

We have options…

There are a few options available, and in this test case I wanted to compare them

Over the last month I’ve been writing about different ways to shoot a watch. One way involved using only DIY modifiers and the other one was done using nothing but an iPad. This is the last part of the series and it is focused more on using photoshop way to complete the shoot.

Last week I wrote about why you would want to do a DIY photography project, but can it match up to pro gear? Challenge… Accepted!

This week I did a whole photoshoot using only DIY modifiers for main lights. With the help of my girlfriend and her friends to model for me, the challenge was on.

The idea behind challenge was to prove that making your own modifiers and equipment is not all that bad compared to branded expensive material. (And before the first comment starts coming in, let me say that I do own a couple of Westcott softboxes and umbrellas, and I use them when needed or when working with high end clients, I just really like my DIY’s).

There are a lot of things you can do with just 2 lights, actually, you can do some kicking products shots. Here are a few quick and easy product photography setups that you can add to your toolkit. (+ the occasional use of a DIY modifier)

For the whole shoot I was using a Nikon D7000 and a 18-55 kit lens. (kit lenses are awesome!) I was using a mix of speedlights and studio strobes for the lighting. I also had a dust blower used for sensors to get dust off my subjects.

There’s a new trend on YouTube these days: making parody videos of all the horrendous tutorials we find so often there. They can be of someone holding a camera like it’s in the middle of a magnitude 7.6 earthquake; or what about the ones where the uploader goes off for about seven minutes on the premise of why he’s making the tutorial? And then there’s the videos that just… give plain bad advice in general. This video hilariously depicts exactly that by teaching you how to clean a Canon 5D – by submerging it into a tub of water and soap.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post going over Schilieron Flow Visualization, a method used to detect and visualize waves emitted from sound. NPR gave us a detailed and incredibly informative look into how it was all done.

Now, it looks like there’s a way to capture those waves through a lens yourself. A user on Instructables named jlansey recently put up a tutorial going over how you can make your own setup on a $9 budget (…assuming you already have a camera, of course).

I am a big fan of using simple objects or DIYing solutions in my photograph. One thing I always like doing is using a Gobo (photography lingo fo go-between) to make any plain background stand out. Nowadays, I am using a device called the Light Blaster which can act as a dedicated gobo projector, but before I got it, I DIYed my own patterns for the background.

So here are examples of everyday objects I use to create some cool patterns on the background.

There are so much possibilities when mixing flash and light painting together, and so many great photographers out there that have done amazing things with this technique, so here is a basic photography tutorial on how to mix flash and light painting in one exposure.

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Allen Mowery is a commercial and lifestyle photographer, pseudo-philosopher, and wannabe documentarian killing time amidst the rolling hills of Central Pennsylvania. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him. You can check out his work on his website or follow along on Facebook, Twitter (@allenmowery), and 500px.

JP Danko is a commercial photographer based in Toronto, Canada. JP
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.

Laya Gerlock is a Portrait and Product photographer based in the Philippines. His passion is teaching and sharing his knowledge in Photograpy and has been doing this for 6 years. You can follow his work on his web page, follow him on Flickr and if you happen to come by Cubao, Quezon City (To Manila, Philippines) he gives a great workshop!

Maaz Khan started off teaching himself photography with a disposable Kodak camera he got for his 7th birthday. His main weapons of choice are now the 5D Mark II, and an LG G2 when mobility calls.

Stefan Kohler is a conceptual photographer, specialized in mixing science, technology and photography. He is one of the founders of Kamerakind, based in Traunstein, Southern Germany. You can follow him on Facebook or on 500px.com

Tiffany Mueller is a photographer based in Hawi, Hawaii. You can follow her Twitter here and her personal life here.